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1 Introduction. Avant-Garde Journalism Introduction. Avant-Garde Journalism: Hannah Weiner’s Early and Clairvoyant Journals “Typing to you a thoug[h]t is seen cartridge script machine.” ―Hannah Weiner, letter to Bernadette Mayer, April 19, 1975 It is an extremely rare thing in any field to invent a new form. Invention, as such, momentarily collapses the frontier between theory and practice. This is why it not only invariably widens the scope of that field’s potential acheivements, but it appears to us, in hindsight, as an event, a phenomenon, a content through which to bring the overall form of that field into historical relief. Although largely unknown and practically unread, Hannah Weiner accomplished such an invention. She called it “large-sheet poetry” – I call it “avant-garde journalism.” With the publication of Weiner’s major works of the 1970s, we come a long way toward filling in the missing links between the so-called “New York School” and “Language Writing,” while we witness another literary-critical incursion: the mingling demands of a formalist and phenomenological approach indicative of the larger “radical modernist” tradition in USAmerican poetry. This tradition accounts for the ascedence of the anomalies, the formative strangeness, of our most vibrant tradition, stemming from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gertrude Stein’s radical narrative theories, through the intermedial arts of Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, and later in the auto-ethnography of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nathaniel Mackey. No lesser figure than Bruce Andrews has described the publishing environment for his own, formative work of the early 1970s as split between a “radical formalist fringe” and “performance kind of things” (6-7). Weiner bridged this divide with the Clairvoyant Journal. This introduction aims to orient the reader’s way through these texts by way of the intersection of formalism and phenomenology entailed by Weiner’s signature tropes: “clairvoyance” and “large-sheet poetry.” Weiner was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1928 where she graduated from Classical High School, graduating from Radcliffe College in 1950. She subsequently worked as a lingere designer in New York City. In the early 1960s she began giving performances, one of which – “Hannah Weiner at Her Job” – consisted of a sort of open house hosted by her employer, A.H. Schreiber Co., Inc. Other similar works (“Street Works” and “World Works”)mixed new poetic and narrative forms with recent work in conceptual art, and, as with Weiner’s friend and co-conspirator Bernadette Mayer’s watershed installation piece “Memory,” questioned the museum and book alike, as a storehouse of cultural memory. Most significantly, after studying poetry with Bill Berkson and Kenneth Koch at the New School for Social Research in 1963, and through working friendships with 2nd generation New York School poets such as Mayer and Ted Berrigan, Weiner composed and performed a series of Code Poems, collected as such for her second published book of poetry in 1982. Utilizing a 19th century system of visual signals for communication at sea, these works, along with similar early works by Jackson Mac Low, brought avant-garde forms of translation to bear upon contemporary socio- political issues, particularly 70’s American feminism and the American Indian Movement 1 (AIM). These works were contextually and methodologically identical to coterminus “translation” and “eventual verse” works of Mac Low’s – so much the case that Mac Low and Weiner open Douglas Messerli’s anthology for New Directions, “Language” Poetries. Weiner’s first book of poetry, however, was basically a New York School attempt to write verse in response to the paintings of Rene Magritte; The Magritte Poems was published in 1970. By the end of the 60’s, all the hallmarks of Weiner’s later work were in place. It was then that she found a way to syncretize them: the mundane, everyday experiences in her personal life; playful and personal responses to high and official cultural artefacts; and theoretical and practical forms of ideological critique. It was both the formal and the performative (phenomenological) that would be reunited under the rubric of “clairvoyance.” In his Poetry Project Newsletter review of Code Poems in 1983, John Perrealt writes, Many were trying to do it; few could. For various reasons we wanted to get poetry off the page … media crossover … Off the page and into the dustbin of history. It was the 60s, so everything seemed possible. The poetry reading became the poetry event became the performance. And Hannah Weiner was in the middle of it … And what is left of these works? Hannah Weiner burned all her documentation and became a clairvoyant poet. (8) 1980’s Little Books / Indians lived quite literally by its name. The “large-sheet” poems were organized into “little books,” while the sentences were more often cut short so as to resemble verse. Weiner’s interest in the AIM became the focus of the ideological theme of the collection, moreover providing a more easily recognized narrative thrust. Spoke (1984), Silent Teachers / Remembered Sequel (1993), and We Speak Silent (1997) are closer to the Clairvoyant Journal in form and theme, but further develop the aspect of clairvoyance pertaining to inter-personal relations mediated by language the author called “silent teaching.” This theme is essentially a means of inquiry into global, holistic politics inspired by avant-garde art in the West and Eastern religious practices often alluded to in the Clairvoyant Journal. Weiner’s last major work, PAGE (2002), is a deeply complex series of poems closer to normative lyric verse yet highly disjunctive in terms of grammatical forms. It is also a deeply personal work in which the deaths of her aunt and mother become an allegory in an intra-personal take on silent teaching. Weiner is, as Mac Low notes in his jacket blurb to the Angel Hair edition of Clairvoyant Journal, both a “remarkable case” and a remarkable artist; “Her acheivement -- & it is a considerable one – lies in her having developed a specific literary form through which to convey her remarkable experience.” Mac Low’s blurb calls (in the least) for a study of how this “specific literary form” came to be, specifically, “literary.” Doing so requires us to understand clairvoyance as a synaesthetic ability / capacity of our own, and incorporate this into our reading practices: according to current institutional prescriptions, this would be tantamount to critical synaesthesia. And this is not the synaesthesia taught in college guidebooks. That is, it is not a descriptive technique, evoking categorical ambiguities (in the tradition of William Empson). In her reading copy of the Clairvoyant Journal, Weiner had written in the title of A. R. Luria’s 2 famous study, The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria’s case study of the synaesthete and mnemonyst “S” speaks eloquently of a “form of extended reference” based on clairvoyant phenomena uncannily like those Weiner documents in the early journals, which consist, simultaneously, of a documentation of the development of “large-sheet poetry.” In his transcription of S’s testimony: I was ill with scarlatina … I had come back from Hebrew school with a headache and my mother had said: “He has heets [Yiddish: “fever”]. True enough! Heets is intense, like lightning … and I had such a sharp orange light coming out of my head. So that word’s right for sure! (86-7) Mac Low recognizes what Luria sees in “S” – that there is a literal sense “beyond belief” where the “case” and the “artist” forge contexts in which new forms become inevitable. Through Luria, S himself is a kind of avant-garde journalist; Luria’s case study endures largely because it falls, formally, somewhere between the prescriptions of that genre and those of memoir and even eulogy. It is a synaesthetic work. Most recently, poet-critic Judith Goldman has elaborated the ethical link between the “case” and the “artist.” In an exemplary reading of Weiner’s so-called “clair-style,” Goldman analyzes the metalinguistic political interventions the formal attributes of Weiner’s clairvoyant writings made. Goldman’s analysis of the tri-vocality of the Clairvoyant Journal is especially brilliant for its discussion of the overdetermination of the expression of one’s motives in or as language, recalling post-structuralist paradigms via Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, and other theorists; “In staging the author’s compelling and reader’s compulsion through a trope that solicits credibility yet remains beyond belief, i.e., clairvoyance, Weiner aims not at representational accuracy, but at ethical adequacy; not the authority of experience, but the experience of alterity as an alternate and indefinite authority” (153). Indefinite as it may be, such authority is either ability in potentia or a choral address which diversifies the ontological basis of any ethical adequacy, where the body becomes the staging of forces only tangentially literary, religious, or corporeal. The interlocutions make this evident, if not definite; “this year you don’t believe in reincarnation foolish in fact / when you don’t believe in it it seems otherwise dont interrupt dont scold” (“Dec 27 Sat p2,” Clairvoyant Journal). Writing the body for Weiner is performing it to and with itself. Poet-critic Maria Damon’s recent article on Weiner’s work uses theories of trauma to argue along the sort of lines debates over writing the body have tended to follow. That is, the performance is invariably psychopathologized. Neither critic, therefore, escapes the confines of the tropical; neither points to clairvoyance as an ability underpinning Weiner’s “acheivement.” Goldman is too much a formalist, Damon too much a phenomenologist, for Weiner’s peculiar syncretism. * * * * * When I see words I am also able to know, by reading or handling a book, as example, if an author is a friend, what her illness is, what books she prefers, whether she knows what to do for herself, whether to read her at 3 all.
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